Impact Nigeria

UI/UX Designer

CommunityX - Chinenye Ezeh

Impact Nigeria connects donors and social impact organizations in Nigeria so that those in the Nigerian diaspora living outside the country can support them.

My role

Pro bono UI/UX Designer in a team with a Product Manager (Chinenye Ezeh) and Developer (Adrian Ross) as a part of the first CommunityX cohort
Helped to expand on user research through interviews, designed wireframes and high-fidelity mockups for development

Results

A website for users to find reputable social impact organizations to support
Designs that addressed trust concerns from users
Pitch video to hiring officers from various companies

Website Video

Definition and user research

Prior to the cohort's start, Chinenye shared a survey with results from 84 people to know about users' feelings and habits about donating to Nigerian organizations.

To augment these survey results, we interviewed four people of varying types to get more detailed information and create user personas (seen below).

Insight 1: Donors don't trust a lot of Nigerian organizations, unless they have a personal connection.

Insight 2: Almost everyone was willing to donate or support organizations.

Insight 3: Users were most interested in organizations related to youth development, women's issues, and education.

Survey results

60% donate never to once a year

72% don't donate because they're unsure of what the funds will be used for

Other barriers include not knowing orgs to support or how to support them

User personas

Well-intentioned Skeptic

A Nigerian entrepreneur, Ibrahim, owns his own business in the US after moving there shortly after school and starting a family in the US.

He wants to use his extra income to donate to nonprofits in Nigeria, especially to empower other youth who want to be entrepreneurs.

He doesn’t fully trust the organizations because he can’t find recent evidence of how donations have helped in the past. So he ends up supporting the children of family friends, giving them money directly.

One-time Donor

Uzoamaka is a tenured professor who advises the campus Nigerian student group. She is well involved in the Nigerian community in their college and city.

She usually donates money to Nigerian organizations as she hears about them, and ramps up more when there’s a crisis.

However, she has very little time and disposable income to use for donations. She's not really interested in donating talent, but will occasionally spend time doing drives or speaking at local events.

Loyal Contributor

Esther works as a branding consultant and often has odd working hours during the day. She’s also an active volunteer at her local church that has a large Nigerian community.

She wants to support Nigerian organizations as much as she can, so she has set up recurring donations to her favorite non-profit that aims to serve women’s health issues. She also spends time doing pro bono work for the same non-profit.

She doesn’t go too much beyond her usual nonprofits, especially because she doesn’t trust organizations that haven’t been personally vetted by family/friends.

Iteration and wireframes

I used Adobe XD to design simple wireframes for the four pages for the website: Home, About, Contact, Organization details.

I tried two different ways to show the organizations, as cards and as a table. I later decided to use the card design for featured organizations and the table for the rest of the organizations.

Home page

About page

Mobile wireframes

Color and layout iterations

Implementation and final designs

To address the insights we got from our users, I implemented the following solutions:

Solution 1: Transparency in our vetting process and showing concrete outcomes on the organization pages

Solution 2: Branding matches the Nigerian flag and the green elicits emotions of wealth and prosperity

Solution 3: Dynamic and empowering pictures avoid "poverty visuals" that other charities have when highlighting African countries

I designed with a mobile-first attitude, knowing that people access sites on both mobile and desktop. The experience was designed to be consistent for both.

I handed off the designs to the developer by sharing the XD file with him and curating a detailed style guide for him to follow.

I also created a shared Google drive folder for photo and icon assets for him to pull from.